Picture this: You’re driving your car, and the radio starts playing your favorite song. You crank up the volume. You’re singing along. You’re bobbing your head. You’re tapping your foot. You feel the music. The lyrics are telling your story.
How does emotion get infused in music, and how do we experience emotion when listening to music? I propose several forces are at work. One force is the emotional state of the listener when selecting music, and a second force is the intention of the artist. A third force is the dynamical real-time experience of emotion while listening to music – the artist by listener interaction – which is the most speculative and difficult to specify and grasp.
Emotional State
Emotion has a long history in philosophy and psychology. Wilhelm Wundt – one of the founders of experimental psychology – proposed our emotional state occupies a place in a multidimensional space, dimensions that include degree of excitement, pleasantness, and relaxation. For example, we may at once feel sad (low excitement), agitated (low pleasantness), and distressed (low relaxation). This state may impact how we select and respond to music.
Indeed, Mood Management Theory posits we select media – in this case, music – to alter or maintain our emotional state. Consider a media selection context, such as choosing music for the car ride to work, at work, to wind-down in the evening, or while with friends. Mood Management Theory posits that our mood guides what media we consume in each context, and our choice is designed to optimize our mood. A key assumption of the theory is that we are motivated to reduce negative states and maintain or induce positive states, a motivational goal that may be outside of our conscious awareness.
In Mood Management Theory, several features of media are thought to impact our mood, including the potential to excite or calm, the potential to engage and alleviate, and the semantic content of the media (if similar to mood, can maintain mood, but if different than mood, can alter mood), and the valence (positive or negative). A combination of these factors is selected to alter our mood. One can begin to see how we can move ourselves around the multidimensional space described by Wundt by selecting media with specific features, and maybe, just maybe, it’s not so random when we’re flipping through our records and one pops out as “the one.”
Intention
Music feels like it carries emotion. I wanted to gain artists’ perspective on how music gets infused with emotion. One artist I connected with is Peter McCaughan, the Irish musician known as Alpha Chrome Yayo (ACY), who, over the past few years, has released a series of albums exploring a vast range of moods and infused with melodies and energy that explore a plethora of emotions.
ACY said, “It’s impossible for me to overstate the importance of emotions in music. My number one goal is to make people feel things – it’s as simple as that.”
There is a bit of a mystery to how and why some music carries a certain emotion. I asked ACY, and he explained it is hard to know how music gets its emotions. He said, “One of the best surprises is when I’ve composed something that I know sounds soothing and healing, but that I’m also hoping sounds a little melancholic. There’s not necessarily a particular, identifiable musical technique at work that ‘should’ be making it sad or morose, but, on some level, it is to me. I had a Bandcamp listening party recently for my new album, Home for Hitodama, which I loved. Lots of people were saying things like, ‘hey, there’s lots of sadness on this, but I don’t really know why’.”
ACY added, “That’s incredible to me, especially for instrumental music like this album. Like, I wanted it to feel sad, to me it does feel sad, but it’s hard to qualify why. Yet, other people pick up on it and feel it too. I don’t think there’s anything supernatural going on here, but I feel like I could get into relating it to the concept of oneness, if I was smart enough.”
When I asked ACY about the role his own mood plays in composing, he said “In terms of my own mood, it absolutely plays a role, but again, often in surprising ways. I write a lot of my darkest music when I’m at my most content and peaceful – it’s like my brain knows it’s okay to allow me room to get introspective, maybe a little scary, without being overwhelmed. Conversely, if I’m writing a lot of soothing music, it’s often because I feel like I need it, personally.”
ACY did explain there are some techniques that are known to elicit certain feelings. He said, “For example, today I’m working on a track for a game which involves a sort of spy-movie type sound, so I’m using a lot of stacked minor major sevenths and ninths, commonly called the James Bond chord. It sounds inherently mysterious, something that was hard-wired into our psyches, long before Bond sipped his first ever martini.”
Another example is the devil’s tritone, which is an interval made up of three tones and rumored to have been avoided in music composed within the church due to its dissonant quality, giving it its’ name. It rose to fame in heavy metal culture from the opening notes of the self-titled song by Black Sabbath but is present in a variety of genres, such as the song “Maria” from West Side Story. In Maria, the tritone adds a bit of darkness and intensity to the otherwise subdued melody.
I also connected with Dana Jean Phoenix, an artist whose sound, vocals, and lyrics synergistically create emotion to learn about her approach to infusing music with emotion. She explained that the story she is trying to tell is a critical piece. Dana said, “I believe great stories involve strong relatable emotions that people can connect with. I’ll write from a certain character’s perspective, and then I know my vocal delivery has to come from a deep emotional and personal place for the words to resonate with others.”
Interestingly, this approach seems to influence the sound of her vocals. Dana said, “By tapping into those emotional moments, it can bring out some interesting textures in my vocal timbre, which I’ve learned to embrace.” She added that vocals fueled by emotion “will often be far more interesting or haunting than a pitch-perfect performance.”
Dana told me her approach to composing with respect to emotion is a mixed bag, and that keeps it interesting. For example, sometimes she explores sounds and melodies, and when she stumbles upon something that feels right, it will dictate the emotion and direction of the lyrics and song. She said, “An interesting synth sound can immediately trigger and invoke ideas and emotions.”
I asked Dana Jean Phoenix how she makes all the pieces of her music work together with respect to emotion. She said, “Having a strong perspective of what story or message the song is trying to convey will help to sync the lyrics, vocals, and instrumentation in a way that makes sense together.” She told me that a gut feeling helps inform the direction of a song. “If it delights, excites, or frightens me, that’s a good starting point. I’ll do a deep dive of what the sound is making me feel, where it’s living in my body, and why.”
Dana told me she uses a technique that can really engage the listener. She said, “There’s also a fun exercise to try and write against what may be the obvious emotion of the music. For example, it may be interesting to write a song of falling in love and innocence over instrumentation that sounds quite sinister. It allows the listener to perhaps come to their own conclusion about what the subtext may be. On the surface, the lyrics could be sweet, but perhaps there’s an underlying darkness. Perhaps it’s obsessive love. Maybe this character is unaware of the danger they could be putting themselves by falling head over heels with a relative stranger. Perhaps this love could come at a cost. Sometimes a disconnect can be exciting and allow a listener to draw their own conclusions.”
ACY explained how an artist can use certain techniques as a base and then manipulate them to create something new and unexpected. He added, “I think that’s the key to unlocking the emotions that are buried a little bit deeper.” This concept of going deep was inspired by something David Lynch once said:
“Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They’re huge and abstract. And they’re beautiful.”
ACY said, “That’s what I’m really trying to do, in terms of emotions. I want to catch the big fish, and I very much hope I can reel you in.”
Dynamics of Emotional Experience
ACY told me when he composes he often wants people to experience a given emotion, perhaps warmth, amusement, of fright. Critically, he added, “I ultimately don’t have a say in how my music makes people feel. Very often it’s entirely different to what I imagined, and that’s wonderful to me. Emotions, people and music all have the power to surprise, to inspire. It’s like actual magic to me.”
The emotion we experience while listening to music seems to come, in part, from our current state, desired state, and movement between them when we select music and begin listening, and, in part, what emotions the artist intended to elicit and their impact on us while listening. But what is an emotional experience, and how does the listener add their piece to the equation? This question requires a dive into what emotions are.
This is where the Theory of Constructed Emotions comes in. This theory of emotion applies to music well because it describes emotion as an active, dynamic process. The basic idea is that our brain is continuously trying to categorize sensations, and the categorization of sensations gives them meaning. This making sense of sensations is the emotion. For example, a heavy feeling in the gut while watching a movie might be categorized and labeled “sadness.” The radical implication of this theory that there is no limit to the number of emotions we feel, though we may not have conventional labels for all emotions we experience, as we do with primary emotions such as ‘happy.’ This, I think, is important for our emotional experience while listening to music because our feelings may not be neatly categorized into primary emotions, such as sad, happy, angry, and so on.
With respect to music, sounds and bodily sensations may be the most relevant inputs to the brain to make sense of. In music, sensations are flowing continuously through our body – the bending of a note, the culmination of a solo, the intro melody, a powerfully delivered chorus, the force with which the notes are played, pitch, intonation, a funky beat, groovy bass line, and much more. These may raise hairs on the back of our neck, cause our eyes to well up, or boost our energy, all sensations that the brain tries to categorize momentarily as they emerge and pass, giving rise to a fleeting emotional experience as the song or album ebbs and flows. Further, our prior experience, current mood, and vision and hope for the future all add meaning, coloring the emotion.
A moment in time while listening to music is incredibly complex. Something ACY said illustrates the point. He said, “I’m currently typing this out, enjoying the smell of coffee in the air, the feeling of my keyboard under my fingers, the way my brain is whirring, converting thoughts to text. I’m also tired, a little sore and anxious. The coffee probably isn’t helping! But, it’s part of the equation. And, shit, that’s a lot of emotion right there, even in one simple moment.”
Emotion while listening to music glues the present moment to other moments in time – the distant past, the recent past, the coming moments, and vision for the future. ACY told me about a Japanese phrase, ‘ichigo ichie’ which he said translates roughly to ‘one life, one moment’, or ‘once in a lifetime’. “It’s about celebrating the uniqueness of each moment”, he said. The emotional experience listening to music is one moment, even each instance of revisiting your favorite song is entirely unique.